Typically, when a customer experiences damage to the roof of his or her home (e.g., shingles lost or damaged due to high winds, a hail storm, a fallen tree, etc.) and files a claim with an insurance provider, the insurance provider will assign a representative to investigate the claim. The claim representative may be tasked with identifying/locating appropriate replacement materials in order to determine the appropriate payment to the customer. Because roof damage is often restricted to a particular portion or portions of the roof, and to avoid unnecessarily replacing roofing materials (e.g., shingles or tiles) on the entire roof, the claim representative may need to locate a roofing material product having the same style, color and quality as the product used on the undamaged remainder of the roof. If the same roofing material product is no longer manufactured, the claim representative may need to identify a roofing material product that is acceptably similar in appearance and quality to the roofing material product that was damaged.
Currently, for shingles, claim representatives attempt to manually identify the product (e.g., manufacturer and part number) by looking at the shingles and assessing characteristics such as the style (e.g., pattern), size, quality and color. Unfortunately, this can be a difficult task requiring a substantial amount of training and/or experience. While some experienced roofing professionals and certain commercial services may be able to identify a “match” with an existing product (i.e., an exact match, or a similar replacement product) with fairly high confidence, it may be costly, time consuming, or otherwise not feasible for an insurance provider to use such professionals and/or services. And while, in some instances, the release tape on the back of shingle tabs (or the back of tiles, panels, etc.) may have some limited identifying information, a destructive method may be required to access that information, and the information may be incomplete. If the product is misidentified, and/or a replacement product is not sufficiently similar in appearance and/or quality, the customer may be dissatisfied, and/or the insurance provider may need to arrange for a different roofing material product to be installed at an additional cost to the insurance provider.